Through her personal testimony, Danielle hopes to share vital truths about the importance of a life of purity. This presentation outlines some of the influences which shaped her views of life, spiritually, sexuality, and ultimately of God. Her message is a testament to the cleansing power of Jesus Christ.

ECYC 2015: Christ In Me

<p>Through her personal testimony, Danielle hopes to share vital truths about the importance of a life of purity. This presentation outlines some of the influences which shaped her views of life, spiritually, sexuality, and ultimately of God. Her message is a testament to the cleansing power of Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Eastern Canada Youth Conference

Morning Devotional

Danielle Harrison

Sexual Purity: Lost and Found

Purified & Preserved

Pins & Needles of Sin

This morning I am going to be sharing my testimony.

And my desire is to share something with you that shows you that victory is possible, that we can live a life where Jesus is living out his will within us, even if we come from a history as dark and stained as mine.

I am going to be talking about some mature topics today.

I'm going to be talking about total purity, and that is going to include sexual purity.

And so I'm going to be touching on some things that historically in the church we have shied away from talking about.

Now I assure you I'm going to strive to share those in a way that will paint the true ugliness of sin.

And my humble prayer is that it will not glorify sin in any way.

But I feel like we need to be talking about these things because we can't just pretend like they don't exist.

And we need to be presenting them in a biblical way so that our young people are receiving the knowledge from God that He can provide because otherwise they're getting all their information from the world and that is scary and it really isn't safe.

So before we proceed on, let's just say 1 more word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, I am so grateful for the privilege and the honor of being here at ECYC this morning and sharing the story that you have given.

Lord, it's your book, I am just the pages.

And I cannot convey these deep spiritual things on my own.

Spiritual things are spiritually discerned.

So I need you to fulfill your promise from Exodus 4.12, where you told the stuttering and stumbling Moses that his part was to go and you would put your words in his mouth.

And so I ask you to do that for me this morning.

And I ask you also to give spiritual discernment to each and every person here this morning.

May they not only hear a story of transformation, but Lord, help them to see the spiritual object lessons, the spiritual implications of the story along the way, and help them to see how it relates to their life and how they can apply these things in their own journey.

So I usually start from the very beginning.

I really think that the photos add an extra dimension so you can really understand exactly where I was all along the way.

I came into a home where my parents were struggling in their marriage.

They were not planning on having another child.

My sister and brother were already 6 and 8 years old when I came into the picture.

My mom says as soon as I was able, I was always singing and dancing everywhere that I went.

And we'll talk more about my experience with music all along the way.

Just like technology, music can be used for good or for evil in this world.

I think we're all intrinsically designed to have music as a part of our worship experience and it's easy to use music to worship the wrong things.

This is actually a quote from a magazine called The Advocate.

And Madonna was interviewed and asked about her hints towards homosexuality in her music videos.

She said, They, meaning the viewers, will digest it on a lot of different levels.

Some people will see it and be disgusted by it, but maybe they'll be unconsciously aroused by it.

If people keep seeing it and seeing it and seeing it, eventually it's not going to be such a strange thing.

And I think she kind of understood something that us as consumers might not always understand, that the subconscious mind had been studied for almost 100 years at this point, and they were using it, at first to sell their products, but now also to sell their views.

And this is happening more and more in the society that we live in today.

And so this quote would have been taken around the same time that I was watching her music videos on MTV.

Now we didn't have Jesus in our home, but we did have the world in abundance through television and radio and Hollywood movies.

I'm gonna turn away from that influence and look at a more holy 1.

This is found in the book Appeal to Mothers on page 11.

She says, mothers, you cannot be too careful in preventing your children from learning low habits.

It's easier to learn evil than to eradicate it after it is learned.

Neighbors may permit their children to come to your house, to spend the evening and the night with your children, and here is a trial and a choice for you, to run the risk of offending your neighbors by sending their children to their own home, or gratify them and let them lodge with your children, and thus expose them to be instructed in that knowledge, which would be a lifelong curse to them." Now when we look at this quote contextually, how it's found in the context of the chapter, we see that this lifelong curse that she's referring to, She's actually talking about what she calls self-abuse.

The medical term that we use today is masturbation.

And my mother didn't know this counsel when I was growing up.

Unfortunately, I was permitted to have frequent sleepovers, and this did bring a curse into my life at a very young age.

My parents divorced when I was 6 years old, and we moved into some low-income housing.

And it was there in that development that I met a young girl.

But she told me some things later that led me to realize that she was actually being sexually abused by someone in her life.

And so she was learning things about her body that she should not have known.

And as a result of those experiences, she started sharing those things with me.

And so I also started learning things about my body that I shouldn't have known.

So I started interacting with the same sex sexually at the age of 7, and masturbation soon became an addiction for me.

This was a stronghold in my life for many years until eventually I gave my heart to Jesus and he established me in victory.

My mother and my sister found out that my relationship with this girl was not quite what it should be.

They didn't know the extent of what was going on between her and I, but they just didn't know how to approach the subject.

I think a lot of us, when it comes to sexuality, we, in the world, we just joke and laugh about it because we don't know how to be serious about this topic.

They started poking fun at me and and making jokes and saying, Daniel kisses girls, ha ha ha.

And you can imagine how humiliating this was for me.

And I thought this was something I needed to be ashamed of and I needed to hide.

And so I made the decision in my mind that no 1 else would know about my feelings or practices, even though they continued and other girls came and went as the years went by.

When I was 9 years old, I was actually baptized.

I had been attending church unfrequently with a family friend.

And the pastor sat us down and he said, do you believe in Jesus?

But for me, as I wanted to be a good girl, I wanted to do the right thing.

I had learned a little bit about sexual purity by this time, and so I wanted to stay a virgin until I was married.

And I didn't want to do alcohol or drugs because I had seen the way that alcoholism had interrupted my family's experience and been a big factor in my parents' separation.

But unfortunately, I didn't have a relationship with Jesus.

I didn't know how to make those promises real in my life.

And to have a relationship with someone, what do you have to do?

You have to come to know who they are and what they're really all about.

And through that trust develops love and commitment.

And this was not an experience that I had had with Jesus.

I only had a superficial knowledge of who he was, and I really wasn't making that commitment to him on that day when I was baptized.

And so those promises that I made to myself, they melted away very quickly.

Within just a few short years I was really struggling with depression and trying to just figure out who I was in the world, where I fit in, and what my place was.

I was struggling with depression because I was realizing that I couldn't be that good girl that I wanted to be.

I was making a lot of bad decisions in my life.

I was choosing the wrong friends and I was getting into trouble already.

And, you know, I had gone on and then off of antidepressant medication.

I had started smoking cigarettes when I was only 11, and by this time in my life, I was smoking habitually, and, you know, I just, I was really, really struggling with the person that I wanted to be but the person that I actually was.

And in that place in my life, I was trying to fit in somewhere in the crowd.

And I moved to Washington State, up in the Pacific Northwest, where kind of anything goes, and everybody lives out loud.

And I was seeing some fringe groups that I wasn't exposed to growing up in Wyoming.

Series

Morning Devotional

Sexual Purity: Lost and Found

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Timeless Keys to Resilience

The Resiliency Mindset, Part 1

28m

Driving While Under the Influence

48m

Workshop: Dealing with Conflicts In Ministry

Dealing with Conflict and Adversity in Personal Liberty

1h 1m

Experience Versus Scripture

38m

Why Am I a SDA?

4. What the Devil Hates

51m

Breakout 2- Chad & Fadia Kreuzer

5. Freedom and the Frontal Lobe

42m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

07 Mission to My Neighbor

20m

Acts

Acts: Baptized By the Spirit

40m

The Faces of the Wicked

51m

Plenary

My Story, His Faithfulness

1h

The Principle of GIGO on Pandemics: Reaping What We Sow

45m

Understanding Difficult Topics

3. The 1000 Years of Peace

1h 10m

Sound Doctrine